Having done both SQL and C# for a very long time I prefer C# with Linq. Linq gives you nearly all the declarative power of SQL with all the procedural goodness of C# to get things done.
Whats needed is a really good object database for C# to eliminate the impedance mismatch.
Don't get me wrong SQL is great, but to be useful it needs to be mixed with a procedural language (pl/SQL, T-SQL, etc) I would just prefer using a more capable typed procedural language instead.
There's a huge list of caveats in Postgres's inheritance documentation [1], and even the obvious issues haven't been touched in decades. I've never heard of anyone using this feature.
At this point, I would say Postgres itself is a tool that doesn't support Postgres inheritance.
Yeah but it doesn't support .Net types directly everything must be translated between the two type systems. Also doesn't support executing .Net code in the PG process. These are the main mismatches that ORM's try to hide with significant overhead.
The impedance mismatch is not about having to translate, but being unable to translate. An yes, that problem exist with relational-only database, but not with PG where you can create composite types, can have arrays of composite types as a column and all other goodies which come with that.
I personally do not find useful to execute .NET code in PG, but technically you could do that.
As long as you can translate LINQ expressions to PG as you can most of them with Revenj you can avoid the pitfalls of mainstream ORMs.
Not sure I have seen a type or construct that could not be translated one way or another. The mismatch is the need for translation. Table per hierarchy, table per subclass etc.. References vs foreign keys. Instance identity vs primary key.
The ability to run procedural code on the db server allow for much better performance than sending data across the network to the app server for processing. Being able to share procedural code between app server and db allows for the choice to be made easily based on the best place to run it rather than whether it might have to be rewritten to move from one to the other. I suppose a plugin could be made for .Net in PG similar to plV8, SQL server has had .Net stored procedures some time with many issue and caveats so it doesn't get much use.
The problem with Linq and what makes it so nice to use is the ability to mix procedural code in the Linq statement ex: list.Where(x=>x.SomeMethod()) Very easy to make something that can't be translated and then starts streaming the entire intermediate result to the app server for processing SomeMethod that would be much more performant in the db tier local to the data.
Right or Entity Framework, but they are just ORM's which is just hiding the impedance mismatch.
I am thinking more along the lines of an embedded db like SQLite but does native serialization, indexing and query optimization against .Net objects and types.
Then to make a "database server" is really just an app server running your c#. If you really wanted to make it like pg then you would have an app server that accepts code snippets, compiles runs and returns results. Of course you would need proper sandboxing like .net fiddle. You could also do something in between like serializing Linq expression trees to send them to server for processing.
In an ideal world where your code runs (client, app server, db server) is a choice based on locality needs not forced by runtimes (javascript in the browser, .Net on the app server, pg/Sql on the db server).
You can pretty much get close to this now with javascript/node/plV8, but again I prefer C#/.Net.
This is basically what most rdbmses have been offering for the last 20 years. Oracle rdbms is in fact an application server, and best practice is to have an app layer built using plsql package through which you access all the data.
More than 20 years ago I actually used it as a true application server, where the database application layer would even generate all the HTML code required to displayed your app ui.
And with database schemas you have proper sandboxing.
I'm with you on this one. I was thinking it would be cool to "bake in" the DB layer of an application and have it run in-process. Then you'd just provide it with block storage and it would handle the rest without having to have a separate server. You could even do compile-time migration and index generation based on your queries. With a distributed actor framework like Akka.NET or Orleans, it could probably be made to scale too.
The only downside is that the only interface to your data is through the application, but there's certainly a use-case for something like that.
Well you don’t need to worry about creation, and migrations. You only need to tell the store which objects it needs to know about. You declare everything in c#.
It’s stores it as jsonb. So you don’t need to worry about weird relationships you only worry about your root aggregate. You can index it. Apply full text search. And persisted columns in the map if for convince or speed.
So Yeah it maps the linq to the equiv sql for you. But allows you to work with your object and worry less about persistence. Cos you can add and remove properties. It’s the closest thing I’ve come to, to being able to forget about the database and focus on code.
I Guess unless you write your own database from the ground up so it supports the language as a feature without dropping back to something else. It won’t happen.
Again that's great, its an ORM, that's what they do, try to abstract the DB from your language, and do their best to hide the impedance mismatch.
However the mismatch is always there, the overhead of mapping types, inefficient serialization (key names repeated over and over in json vs a real schema), certain statements cannot be transpiled to sql so you have pathologic cases at unexpected times, in ability to run any statement you want in the db tier to take advantage of locality and so on.
Most everyone wants a object database since most people are working with objects which is why ORM are so popular.
It’s jsonb so you can’t repeat key names. Serialization is what ever you want to use for json serialization. Other than some report type queries I wanted to write I haven’t found anything that I couldn’t do in linq.
jsonb doesn't do key interning as far as I know. Every field name will be repeated in every record vs a normal column which will only have the column name once in the db.
This really adds up on a large database. Mongo used to recommend short key names and I even think some client would translate them based on some definition to try and save disk/memory/io
Also its not that Linq can't do what you want, its that if you do certain things that can't be translated to SQL the whole intermediate result will be retrieved from the db, deserialized then the linq statement will be run in memory on the client. Its like putting ToList in the middle of your linq statement where a maybe a few million rows might need to be processed to give the very small result.
If the linq statement was being run in process on the db server at least it would happen local to the data and would be more akin to a table scan vs index, still not great but much better then sending all the results to the client for processing.
Whats needed is a really good object database for C# to eliminate the impedance mismatch.
Don't get me wrong SQL is great, but to be useful it needs to be mixed with a procedural language (pl/SQL, T-SQL, etc) I would just prefer using a more capable typed procedural language instead.